Growth Hacking is a practice that has become very fashionable in the business world. Being a discipline that seeks the highest possible benefit through the minimum cost, it quickly became popular at the time when certain cases of startups that had achieved high growth through minimal investment began to become famous.

It is worth mentioning, however, that Growth Hacking is often mistakenly and symbiotically related to sales. This error stems from the fact that the classic way that businesses have used to grow has been to increase their sales; However, Growth Hacking does not seek sales growth, but increased profits, which requires a different perspective.

The Growth Hacker is a professional with a global vision of the business model and the way in which its different parts interrelate and who is then able to identify which parts are the most profitable to optimize in pursuit of increased profit.

Is Growth Hacking applicable to non-profit organizations? Undoubtedly. The first step is to establish a growth objective and for this the most efficient thing is to choose an objective that seeks to optimize the most critical part of our funnel.

• Where do we have the most problems?
• Is our organization known? 
• Do we have activation and conversion problems?
• Do people who donate to us donate again after a while?

Once we identify which is the most critical part of our funnel, we can establish an objective that, to be eligible, must meet 5 characteristics: It must be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and temporary.

Most of the problems that nonprofits have is activation and conversion; that is, in getting people to donate. Therefore, we could choose to establish a goal such as the following:

"We want to increase the number of donations by 15% in the next 3 months and we are going to measure it through the metrics of acquisition by source, conversion rate to sale, cost of acquisition per customer and profitability ratio in acquisition".

Once we have set the goal, we must choose our growth driver. The driver, as its name indicates, is the strategy that will allow us to obtain the best results at the lowest possible cost.

• What drivers could we use to increase the number of donations?
• Would a sectorized campaign fit for a very specific type of audience?
• Would it help us to collaborate with other organizations?
• Would PR increase our acquisition rate?
• Could we use programmatic advertising?
• Would it pay us to do a rebranding?

There are three main frictions that the masses encounter when viewing advertising from non-profit organizations: The first is financial hardship, the second is the credibility of the organization, and the third is the character of the ad, which often appeals to charity.

When we have chosen a driver, we will move on to the experimentation phase. Experimentation, as its name indicates, will be actions that we carry out in an agile and fast way and that we will be continuously testing to find out how to obtain the most optimal results. If, for example, we decide to make a rebranding strategy

• How could we put it into practice?
• Could we create a modern brand that instead of appealing to charity brings humorous traits or appeals to generosity and justice?
• Could we carry out a programmatic advertising campaign where we segment very well those people who really identify with our cause?
• Would it work if we changed the character of the brand through a bold manifesto?

The last phase is the registration of learning. This phase is the most important as far as the discipline is concerned and consists of writing down each one of the experiments that we carry out, the results obtained, the data extracted and the lessons learned.

This will allow us to create a data block from which we can then extract which are the drivers and experiments that work best for us.

For more information on how to grow a nonprofit, just sign up with Hypertry. There you can not only find growth strategies and tactics, but you can also request personalized consulting if you need it.